Papers by Debra Ballentine
Protective Violence, Punitive Mutilation, Spousal Relations, and Gender Hierarchies in the Legal Case of Deuteronomy 25:11–12
SBL Press eBooks, Mar 15, 2021
The Conflict Myth and the Biblical Tradition
Acknowledgements I. Theorizing Myth in Ancient West Asian Studies Myth Theory Biblical Scholarshi... more Acknowledgements I. Theorizing Myth in Ancient West Asian Studies Myth Theory Biblical Scholarship and the Category of Myth Terminology The Ancient West Asian Milieu and the Comparative Enterprise II. The Conflict Topos in Extant Narratives Anzu Enuma Elish Assur version of Enuma Elish Ba'lu Cycle Comparisons and Narrative Taxonomy Conclusion III. The Conflict Motif Victorious Warrior Deities: 'Anatu, Ba'lu, and Yahweh Yahweh's Combat against the Sea/Dragon and Its Relevance for Humans Divine Combat within Historiography: Combined Conflict and Exodus Motifs Yahweh vs. Human Enemies: Combat with Contemporary "Dragons" The Temple The Conflict Motif and Royal Figures Conclusion IV. Continued Adaptation, The Conflict Motif and the Eschaton Hebrew Bible Eschatological Battles Revelation Jesus/Christos as the Divine Warrior Leviathan and Behemoth in the Eschaton and More Eschatological Battles The "Holy One" vs. the Prince of the Sea Conclusion V. The Motif of Yahweh's Authority over the Sea and the Legitimacy of Individuals: Claiming vs. Having Power over the Sea Jesus Antiochus IV Epiphanes Gamaliel Conclusion VI. Conclusion Leave "Chaos" Out of It The Conflict Topos, Distinctions and Comparisons Notes Bibliography Index
What Ends Might Ritual Violence Accomplish?
Oxford University Press eBooks, 2016
שֵׁדִים šēḏīm: Shades of Difference between ‘Demons’, Deity, and שַׁדַּי šadday
BRILL eBooks, Jun 29, 2023
Revising a Myth
SBL Press eBooks, Sep 7, 2017
Continued Adaptation
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jun 1, 2015
Religions, Dec 3, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Religions, Aug 23, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
The Motif of Yahweh’s Authority over the Sea and the Legitimacy of Individuals
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jun 1, 2015
The Conflict Motif
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jun 1, 2015
Andrew R. Davis, Reconstructing the Temple: The Royal Rhetoric of Temple Renova-tion in the Ancient Near East and Israel
Journal of Semitic Studies, Feb 1, 2021
Introduction: Categories and Competition The label "foreign" is one rhetorical tool that ancient ... more Introduction: Categories and Competition The label "foreign" is one rhetorical tool that ancient West Asian and ancient Mediterranean authors utilized to bolster their positions vis-à-vis the various social, political, ritual, and/or theological matters at hand. In what follows, I term strategic use of the label "foreign" in primary texts "foreignization," a specific subtype of Othering. Critical analysis of the labels and categories "foreign" and "other" contributes to our parsing of religious competition in the ancient world, and such analysis is a requisite task for critical reconstructions of ancient society and cultus. Within biblical scholarship, specifically the reconstruction of ancient Israelite and Judean society and religions, notions of "foreign," Canaanite, and "other gods" have been recognized as rhetorical terms that are utilized by certain biblical authors to negatively portray what those authors consider illegitimate. Such foreignization is polemical in nature. As discussed through the examples below, attention to biblical foreignization allows us to appreciate the dynamic creativity with which ancient authors construct notions of Self and Other as well as the nuances in their formulations of prescriptive behaviors. After discussing primary and secondary categorizations more broadly, this article focuses on biblical vocabulary associated with "foreign" and "other gods" in order to demonstrate how such constructions are operative within competitive discourses about a variety of contingent claims that are central to biblical cultus and the status of the Israelite and Judean people and the land. Before delving into biblical notions of "foreign" specifically, I would like to broadly contextualize my discussion of categories and how we utilize, critique, and revise them as scholars. Across the Humanities, we study human cultural products, and in the field of religious studies, we focus on human cultural products that pertain to entities, places, and things that are presented as transcendent, divine, sacred, holy, otherworldly, or universal. Such notions involve claims about human behavior, values, and ideas that are culturally contingent yet framed as natural, given, or even "god-given." The categories with which we organize phenomena communicate how we value them: when we categorize, we impose hierarchies. One essential task of critical scholarship is to continually and rigorously re-evaluate the categories we employ, with the goal of understanding how they have developed, what hegemonic or non-dominant power structures are associated with them, and how we might redescribe the associated phenomena.
Exile and Return of the First Temple Vessels
Near Eastern Archaeology, Sep 1, 2019
Biblical texts exhibit varying accounts of the temple vessels’ “fate” during the Babylonian destr... more Biblical texts exhibit varying accounts of the temple vessels’ “fate” during the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, whether dismantled or taken away. Altogether, biblical historiography features claims of continuity regarding the vessels despite exhibiting repeated disruption and reformulation of their physical location and material. Cultural memory of postexilic reconstitution of cultus features the motif of the temple vessels returning to Jerusalem as a means to claim continuity with preexilic cultus. The vessels work as “a continuity theme” because they operate synecdochally for temple cultus, the “proper” ritual activity that has been disrupted. With this synecdochal value, the vessels’ physical integrity serves to endorse particular ideologies and social groupings within literary portrayals of postexilic Jerusalem.
In this section I clarify my use of specific terminology and explain what I mean by "whole narrat... more In this section I clarify my use of specific terminology and explain what I mean by "whole narrative" and "motif." Briefly, a whole narrative is a story with a beginning, middle, and end that is narrated as a unit. Of course, our extant whole narratives of the conflict topos do not survive in single texts that contain the whole story, but there is sufficient agreement among scholars as to the content and order of these stories for us to read them as whole narratives. In our extant literature from Mari, Israel, and Judah, we do not have lengthy stories about a battle between the warrior deity and sea deity or dragons. Rather, we have references to such a battle in abbreviated form, epitomes or summaries of the conflict and allusions to it. I refer to such references as the "conflict motif." Other terms that might be used where I use "motif" are alloform, 27 mytheme, 28 echo, 29 and minimyth. 30 I will consistently use "motif," by which I mean "a recurrent theme, subject, or image." 31 I prefer this term to the others because it is more accessible than the terms alloform, minimyth, and mytheme and more neutral than the term echo. Cross uses the term "alloform" to designate variant forms of the conflict myth in Ugaritic literature, which contains a whole narrative articulation of the conflict topos and 27 Cross, CMHE, 149.
“Monotheism” and the Hebrew Bible
Religion Compass, Nov 15, 2021
The term monotheism often comes with many caveats. Biblical conceptions of God and categories of ... more The term monotheism often comes with many caveats. Biblical conceptions of God and categories of the divine that interpreters might designate as “monotheism” developed in response to factors within the ancient contexts of biblical authors. However, it is in later Enlightenment contexts that theologians and historians characterize their understanding of biblical theology as monotheistic. As with the terms religion and even Bible, many presume a definition of monotheism that is particularly modern, “western,” and Christian‐centric. Generally speaking, most categorical conceptions of monotheism do not reflect the nuance, variety, and situatedness of our ancient data, both biblical texts and the literature, inscriptions, and available material culture that we utilize in reconstructions of ancient Judean and Israelite traditions. From its outset and still today, scholarly conversation about the category monotheism reflects the impacts of how confessional and traditional histories utilize this term. “Monotheism” often appears as dichotomously paired with “polytheism,” but many scholars prefer alternative concepts such as monolatry, henotheism, or one‐deity discourse. This article invites readers to explore scholarly questions around the relationships between monotheism and the Hebrew Bible by introducing readers to the Enlightenment context for the conceptualization of monotheism, to scholarly considerations regarding the utility of the concept for explaining ancient phenomena, to select relevant ancient data such as deities featured in the Hebrew Bible, and to several topics of study that prominently intertwine with the category monotheism, especially the relationships of Israel and Judah with their neighbors.
Religions
Do you remember the first time you learned about ancient Near Eastern stories from the ‘World of ... more Do you remember the first time you learned about ancient Near Eastern stories from the ‘World of the Bible’ [...]
Religions
This article promotes the theorizing of myth in ways that facilitate comparison and re-descriptio... more This article promotes the theorizing of myth in ways that facilitate comparison and re-description of data within Biblical Studies. After addressing background categorical issues within Religious Studies and Biblical Studies, I chart the old model of contrasting Bible as Truth with myth, including Eusebius’s antique articulation as well as Romantic notions of myth. Challenging outmoded theories, I identify scholarship that works towards rectification of the category myth, with the aim of bolstering scholarly conversations beyond disciplinary boundaries. Finally, the article suggests rectification of multiple Biblical Studies categories related to myth.
Journal of Semitic Studies, 2021
Neural networks are popular and useful in many fields, but they have the problem of giving high c... more Neural networks are popular and useful in many fields, but they have the problem of giving high confidence responses for examples that are away from the training data. This makes the neural networks very confident in their prediction while making gross mistakes, thus limiting their reliability for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, space exploration, etc. In this paper, we present a neuron generalization that has the standard dot-product-based neuron and the RBF neuron as two extreme cases of a shape parameter. Using ReLU as the activation function we obtain a novel neuron that has compact support, which means its output is zero outside a bounded domain. We show how to avoid difficulties in training a neural network with such neurons, by starting with a trained standard neural network and gradually increasing the shape parameter to the desired value. Through experiments on standard benchmark datasets, we show the promise of the proposed approach, in that it can have good prediction accuracy on in-distribution samples, while being able to consistently detect and have low confidence on out-of-distribution samples.
In this section I clarify my use of specific terminology and explain what I mean by "whole narrat... more In this section I clarify my use of specific terminology and explain what I mean by "whole narrative" and "motif." Briefly, a whole narrative is a story with a beginning, middle, and end that is narrated as a unit. Of course, our extant whole narratives of the conflict topos do not survive in single texts that contain the whole story, but there is sufficient agreement among scholars as to the content and order of these stories for us to read them as whole narratives. In our extant literature from Mari, Israel, and Judah, we do not have lengthy stories about a battle between the warrior deity and sea deity or dragons. Rather, we have references to such a battle in abbreviated form, epitomes or summaries of the conflict and allusions to it. I refer to such references as the "conflict motif." Other terms that might be used where I use "motif" are alloform, 27 mytheme, 28 echo, 29 and minimyth. 30 I will consistently use "motif," by which I mean "a recurrent theme, subject, or image." 31 I prefer this term to the others because it is more accessible than the terms alloform, minimyth, and mytheme and more neutral than the term echo. Cross uses the term "alloform" to designate variant forms of the conflict myth in Ugaritic literature, which contains a whole narrative articulation of the conflict topos and 27 Cross, CMHE, 149.
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Papers by Debra Ballentine